Sun has lead the GlassFish community in delivering fully documented, full featured, production quality enterpise software -- for no cost. In addition, Sun has offered valuable support contracts for indemnification and help beyond that provided by the GlassFish community; it's great to have someone to call when you really need help! Sun GlassFish Enterprise Manager just upped the value of purchasing support with the introduction of tuning and self-management tools.

I was privileged to help devleop the Performance Advisor "Tuner" feature of the Enterprise Manager. The Tuner typically improves performance by 300% or more, and on Sun's CoolThreads hardware the performance gain can be greater than 600%! The performance tuner does this by taking into account the hardware configuration, and how it is used. It then recommends configuration changes that will improve your system's performance. Here's what the tool looks like:

As you can see, the UI is intuitive with lots of inline help to guide you. Your hardware will be automatically inspected to see if you have a homogeneous environment (a cluster of like-hardware machines), if not, you'll be informed about customizing specific instances which have different numbers of cores, RAM, etc. Reasonable defaults are pre-populated in the form, making it easy to know approximately what the correct response is likely to be. After you are satisified, click "Next" and you are presented with the list of recommendations. This includes the steps required to manually apply the changes if you'd rather do it yourself versus allowing the Tuner to do it for you. If you let the Tuner to do it, it is kind enough to backup your old configuration so you can compare -- or revert -- your original settings. Many of the settings are configured with "tokens" which can be independently configured per instance in your cluster -- making settings easy to modify for machines which need special settings.

That's it... it really is that simple. After the changes are applied, you can enjoy tremendous performance gains. The Sun GlassFish Enterprise Manager Performance Tuner is a must-have for anyone deploying serious applications with GlassFish.

To learn more, check out Anissa's screencast of the Performance Advisor features. This includes a Performance Tuner demo, plus many of the other features in the Enterprise Manager product.